Have You Never Been Mellow
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN: Have You Never Been Mellow. Olivia Newton-John (vocals): instrumental accompaniment. Have You Never Been Mellow: Loving Arms: Lifestream: Goodbye Again: Water Under the Bridge: and six others. MCA MCA-2133 $6.98,8 MCAT-2133 $7.98, MCAC-2133 $7.98.
Performance: Breezy
Recording: Very good
Funny she should ask if we’ve never been mellow. If you wanted a graphic presentation of Olivia Newton-John’s career so far, you’d go down to Toy City and fetch the “Barbie Goes Down on the Farm” set in expensive plastic-covered cardboard. And I don’t mean to take away a thing, boys, from how cute she is in jeans. It’s just that either (a) she’s been ordered to sing songs in which the lyrics are pap, filler, not to be bothered about, or (b) she has a knack for making songs sound as if they were designed that way. I think it’s mostly been (a), although there are a couple of clear-cut (b) cases here - compare her blank-stare reading of Tom Jans’ Loving Arms to, say, Jody Miller’s (as long as we’re thinking about who looks good in jeans), and you’ll soon stop blaming that particular song.
Newton-John seems to me a child of television, the kind of act video’s dynamics foster: get on looking great, skip through the song without foolishly trying to compete, on the side of the lyrics, with all that twinkle and glow of the elaborate color set, engage the host in a few minutes of bright patter his committee of writers polished and fussed over for weeks, and get off.
But I’m sounding harsher than the subject merits: Olivia is pleasant enough to listen to when the beat is going bippity-boppity - Water Under the Bridge, for example - and, as something to look at, she’s certainly a nice change of pace from TV detectives, grey-haired, curly-haired, bald, or fat. N.C.